The alien hunter of Harvard

By Oscar Schwartz

There are almost two dozen observatories dotted across Hawaii. The dry, thin air atop the volcanoes of the archipelago makes this an ideal place to gaze into the night sky. Over the past decade, the telescopes here have probed deep into neighbouring solar systems, transforming our understanding of the galaxy. Many used to think that Earth was an anomaly within a cosmic void. Now astronomers have identified thousands of planets and reckon that the Milky Way is filled with billions more, many of them similar to ours.

On a clear summer’s night in 2017, a crowd gathered at an observatory near the treeless summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s highest volcano, to listen to one of the world’s foremost astronomers deliver a lecture about these far-away planets: are they all barren or might some be hospitable to life?